How to Set Up Your Company's Dynadot Account

Robyn Norgan

Mar 22, 2014

Shared company accounts can be tricky, especially when you have an employee leave. Whether you're talking about your company's Facebook page, PayPal account, or even your Dynadot account, it's important to make sure you aren't leaving any of these accounts in the hands of just one person. What I mean is, don't let employees use personal or even their individual company emails to set up company accounts.

This is even more important when it comes to your Dynadot account and we have seen customers run into this issue time and again. The account is registered under Jim's name and email and when Jim leaves no one can get to his email and since his name is on the account, it makes it difficult for us to verify the account's true ownership. Don't fall into this trap! Here are a few tips to make sure your company accounts are safe, especially the most important account of all - your domain account!

1. Put Both Your Business Name and the Business Owner's Name on Your Business Domain Account

When your sign up for a free account with us, we ask for your name and just above that we also ask for your organization. Now this is optional because not everyone has an organization, but for a company filling this out it is a must. Filling in the organization's company name can be very helpful for us if say, the person whose name is on the account leaves and no one else can access the account. At the same time, having a person's name associated with the account is also helpful for us because we can verify by ID if they are locked out of the account. Since the name on the account is seen as the owner of the account, I recommend that the owner of the business is listed.

2. Use a General Email Address NOT Associated With Your Domain

There are two parts to this recommendation. One is making sure you don't use an email address associated with your domain such as yourname@yourdomain.com for your Dynadot account. This is because if your domain expires and you can't remember your password, you won't be able to receive our forgot password email. We will be able to help you regain access to your account, but it will take a lot more time and during that time your website will be offline. Two is making sure the email associated with your Dynadot account doesn't just belong to one person. If it only belongs to one person, you're relying on that one person to receive important emails about your domain (like when it expires) and you're opening yourself up the same problem of not being able to access your account if you forget the password. Set up a shared Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or other free email service account for your business that everyone (who should) can access.

3. Always Change the Password After an Employee Leaves

Hopefully you have heeded my advice above and if you have then that means you likely have several employees who can access your shared email and, thus, your Dynadot account. Of course you should make sure these people are trustworthy before handing over the keys to your domain, but even if they're the most trustworthy people in the world, you should still change the password after they leave - for both your shared email and your Dynadot account (if they had the password for it). This is even more important if the break was not-so-amicable as they could potentially change the password before you do and do some real damage (such as taking your website and email down). If you're planning to fire someone, my recommendation is to change the password before you talk to them.

Whether or not your business domain is registered with Dynadot (which of course we hope it is!), these rules still apply. Whether you have a completely online business or a brick-and-mortar store that is supported by your website, it's important to not have your website go offline. In addition to the recommendations above, we also recommending setting your domain to auto-renew to make sure you don't let it expire, which will take it offline and eventually lead to you losing the domain entirely. Learn more about how to set up auto-renew in your account, so you can worry less about your business domain and more about making your business a success!

This post was written by Robyn Norgan, who was inspired to write this article after working with customers who ran into these exact issues and hopes you'll take something away from this article, so you don't become one of them.